As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith

I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being takes practice; and those who are brilliant at being human (what Christians call the saints) are the virtuosi of the moral sphere - the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue.

It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.